Palsied and Feeble

 Recently I found in a notebook a passage from Mme. De Stael's De l'Allemagne that had caught my attention enough to be copied out:

Chaque fois qu’une nouvelle génération entre en possession de son domaine, ne croit-elle pas que tous les malheurs de ses devanciers sont venus de leur faiblesse? ne se persuade-t-elle pas qu’ils sont nés tremblants et débiles, comme on les voit maintenant?

Roughly,

Each time that a new generation comes forward, doesn't it suppose that all the misfortunes of its predecessors derived from their weakness? Doesn't it make itself believe that all the older generation were born palsied and feeble, as one now sees them?

 Well, the notion was not unfamiliar to me when I was young, and I have lived to see the expression "OK, Boomer" popularized by those considerably younger.

What Do You Mean, Undefined?

 Last week I wished to remind myself of the details of error handling for batch files that invoke a script.  I wrote a short script using Microsoft's JScript language that I thought would certainly fail, for it divided a number by zero. It did not fail.

I then spent a little time in a browser's console window. There I discovered that Javascript, as implemented in Chrome, differs not at all from JScript in its treatment of these operations, and that

• A number divided by 0 yields Infinity
• Infinity plus, minus, times, or divided by a number yields Infinity.
• A number minus Infinity yields minus Infinity.
• A number divided by Infinity yields 0
• Infinity divided by Infinity yields "NaN"--a quasi-value meaning "Not a Number".
• Infinity times 0 yields "NaN".
  

I find that the Go language runtime "panics" on integer divide by zero, as I'd expect. But Go does allow one to divide a floating-point number by a floating-point zero (1.0 / 0.0), yielding +Inf. Go's +Inf behaves just like Javascript's Infinity, except that dividing a number by Inf will yield -0 if the number and Inf have opposite signs.

Otherwise, the languages at my disposal, which include Perl, Python, and Scheme, do not allow division by zero, integer or floating-point. All of them raise an error on such an attempt

Num Questions

 When my son was of an age to study Latin, I noticed something that had escaped me in my younger days: Among the words with which one can begin a question are "num", when the expected answer is "No", and "nonne" when the expected answer is "Yes". A friend of about my age said the other week that the point had eluded him, too.

It is not unreasonable that I should have learned this later in life. What I had in my son's school years, and of course not in my own, was a spouse who exercised--to my good and the public's--some authority over my wardrobe. The question, "Is that what you're wearing?"--to the party, to work, to visit with friends--was very familiar. The answer she expected was not exactly "No", it was more  "Well, I thought so, but what's wrong with it?" Still, "Is that what you're wearing?" is definitely a "num" question.

Take Them Out of the Ball Game

 The New York Times has announced today that it will disband its Sports Department, handing coverage over to The Athletic, a sports website that it purchased last year. This does not mean that the sports pages will go away, rather that the current sportswriters will be moved to other assignments. I tend to think of sports writing as its own specialty, though I believe the George Vecsey covered Appalachia for the Times before moving to sports. I do find the notion a little odd, and can think of other sections that the Times could outsource or dispense with at least as easily.